alt Hacker NewsIt's a rather weird combination of year, CPU and memory.
Z80 is (still) an 8-bit CPU with 16-bit addressing. It cannot access more than 64kiB at a time. The hardware and the software needed to overcome that limit was worth more than an 8088/8086 (or compatible CPU) with MS-DOS and Telix.
In 1993,the age of 80286 and 80386, 8088/8086 were considered low-low-end CPUs, let alone the Z80, even in Mexico.
Not pointing my finger, just stating some facts.
Replies
JdeBP • today at 6:26 AM
It was a Z280, not a Z80. And apparently, the person's father's, who also bought and programmed some transputers. See the other posts in the series.
I'm pretty sure I wrote Z280 checking yep, the Zilog Z280 can address 16 MB of memory. It has separated MMU mapping for code and data (64K + 64K mapped anywhere) ideal for operating systems, but if you never enter this mode, then you can access at the same time 64K at the lowest memory address using the normal instructions, 64K using LDUP, and 64K using LDUD. Of course, you can update the MMU registers as required to access other memory spaces, I used the 8K page size. Besides the CPU has a small cache, so it was faster by a magnitude than a Z80.